In English, as in many other languages, male-gendered pronouns are sometimes used to refer not only to men, but to individuals whose gender is unknown or unspecified, to human beings in general (as in ―mankind‖) and sometimes even to females (as when the casual ―Hey guys‖ is spoken to a group of women). These so-called he/man or masculine generics have come under fire in recent decades for being sexist, even archaic, and positively harmful to women and girls; and advocates of (...) gender-neutral (or nonsexist) language have put forward serious efforts to discourage their use. Have they been successful, and to what extent? In this paper, I review some of the main arguments in favor of abolishing sexist male generics. I then present three studies tracking the use of he/man terminology in academic, popular, and personal discourse over the past several decades. I show that the use of these terms has fallen dramatically in recent years, while nonsexist alternatives have gradually taken their place. We may be paying witness to the early stages of the ultimate extinction of masculine generics. (shrink)

Similarities between pragmatist models of democracy and deliberative models have been explored over recent years, most notably in this journal ( Talisse 2004). However, the work of Iris Marion Young has, thus far, not figured in such comparative analyses and historical weighing of pragmatist antecedents in deliberativist work. In what follows, I wish to redress this oversight by placing Young in conversation with John Dewey and Jane Addams. Young's particular brand of deliberative theorizing focuses on the inclusion of women and (...) all those deemed Other in our democracies. She identifies a significant shortcoming in standard expositions of deliberative thought, pointing out that communicative style, structured by oppressive norms of gender, race, and class, to name but a few, may serve to undermine our full participation in political decision making. While this forms a valuable insight for those seeking to redress the exclusion of Others in democracies, it also draws attention to the centrality of differences of communication in deliberative settings. In what follows, I will highlight the integral role played by communication in Young's and Dewey's expositions of democracy while showing that Addams foreshadows Young's principal insight through an appreciation of communicative difference and its attendant political implications. (shrink)

Deconstructive and poststructuralist theories are commonly accused of rejecting all principles of justice and therefore “collaborating with evil.” A canonical example is Martha Nussbaum’s “The Professor of Parody” on the work of Judith Butler. The merits of Nussbaum’s argument and of the “common critique” turn on choosing between two alternative interpretations of Butler’s corpus and of poststructuralism in general. First, assumed in Nussbaum’s critique, is “universal poststructuralism.” Second is “contextual poststructuralism,” which is not susceptible to the common critique. According to (...) the latter and better reading of Butler, subversion and deconstruction take place within a background comprising relatively stable sets of norms, structures of meaning, practices and values. A background that is a necessary enabling condition of deconstructing and performing subversion or parody, and which may include moral norms and principles. Moreover, Nussbaum’s critique may be incommensurable with Butler’s project. Finally, ascribing Butler’s theory the general proposition of rejecting all norms and moral principles ignores the temporal and particularistic nature of Butler’s deconstructive agenda. (shrink)

The increasingly common use of inclusive language (e.g., "he or she") in representing past philosophers' views is often inappropriate. Using Immanuel Kant's work as an example, I compare his use of terms such as "human race" and "human being" with his views on women to show that his use of generic terms does not prove that he includes women. I then discuss three different approaches to this issue, found in recent Kant-literature, and show why each of them is insufficient. I (...) conclude that the tension between gender-neutral and gender-specific views in Kant's work should be made explicit, and I offer several strategies for doing so. (shrink)

Feminism is the movement to end women’s oppression. One possible way to understand ‘woman’ in this claim is to take it as a sex term: ‘woman’ picks out human females and being a human female depends on various anatomical features (like genitalia). Historically many feminists have understood ‘woman’ differently: not as a sex term, but as a gender term that depends on social and cultural factors (like social position). In so doing, they distinguished sex (being female or male) from gender (...) (being a woman or a man), although most ordinary language users appear to treat the two interchangeably. More recently this distinction has come under sustained attack and many view it nowadays with (at least some) suspicion. This entry (around 12 000 words in length) outlines and discusses distinctly feminist debates on sex and gender. (shrink)

In 1977 John Money published the first modern case histories of what he called ‘apotemnophilia’, literally meaning ‘amputation love’ [Money et al., The Journal of Sex Research, 13(2):115–12523, 1977], thus from its inception as a clinically authorized phenomenon, the desire for the amputation of a healthy limb or limbs was constituted as a sexual perversion conceptually related to other so-called paraphilias. This paper engages with sex-based accounts of amputation-related desires and practices, not in order to substantiate the paraphilic model, but (...) rather, because the conception of these (no doubt) heterogeneous desires and practices as symptoms of a paraphilic condition (or conditions) highlights some interesting cultural assumptions about ‘disability’ and ‘normalcy’, their seemingly inherent (un)desirability, and their relation to sexuality. In critically interrogating the socio-political conditions that structure particular desires and practices such that they are lived as improper, distressing and/or disabling, the paper constitutes an exercise in what Margrit Shildrick [Beyond the body of bioethics: Challenging the conventions. In M. Shildrick and R. Mykitiuk (Eds.), Ethics of the body: Postconventional challenges (pp. 1–26). New York: MIT Press, 2005] refers to as “postconventional ethics”. (shrink)